Ivy Coach College Admissions Blog

Don’t wear the hoodie of your future college the day you get your college acceptance. That’s not cool. Not everyone at your school got admitted to their first choice college.

There’s a blog that went up yesterday on “The Choice” blog of “The New York Times” that details the high stress and competitiveness among high school seniors as they compete against each other for highly selective college acceptances. It’s not atypical to lose a couple of friends during one’s senior year of high school because of the highly selective college admissions process and it’s also not atypical for students to regret some of the choices they made with regard to boasting about their college admissions decisions later on in life. We’d like to walk you through a couple of fairly common ways high school seniors risk alienating friends and becoming disliked. All because of the college admissions process!

Many students like to wear the hoodie of the school to which they’re admitted. In fact, many break out this hoodie the day they’re admitted to the university! Don’t be that person. Don’t be the senior who wears the Princeton sweatshirt, Princeton sweatpants, and Princeton baseball hat the day you get in. And don’t wear all this gear the day after either. Or any time that year. It’s totally cool to be proud about your future school but think about the feelings of others. After all, you probably have classmates who applied for admission to Princeton but were denied admission. How do you think they feel when you wear that gear? This is a very easy way to lose friends.

And the same goes for your parents. They, too, are under a lot of stress in the highly selective college admissions process. Many parents view their child’s college acceptances as affirmations of their parenting skills. But however important these college acceptances are to parents, that doesn’t mean they should put up Princeton decals on their back windshields the day their child finds out the admissions decision. That’s not so nice to other parents whose child may not have heard back yet…or worse…whose child didn’t get into Princeton.

Just be mindful of other peoples’ feelings in the college admissions process. You might be really proud you got into Yale but there might be a dozen kids at your high school who are embarrassed they didn’t. And don’t use the term “safety school.” After all, your safety school may be someone else’s reach school. Keep your college admissions decisions as private as you can. Sometimes it’s difficult, we know. Try and be vague if another student asks which schools you’re applying to. They don’t need to know this information. And you don’t have to share it.